Ex-hoopsters are entrepreneurial hot shots

Dec. 9, 2013

Updated 1:26 p.m.

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Dallas Imbimbo, left, and his former high school basketball teammate, Nick Kovacevich, run BigRentz.com out of a warehouse in Santa Ana. They also operate Kush Bottles, a company that sells plastic vials used mainly in the medical cannabis industry, and Three Kings, a partnership that buys and flips residential property out of state. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Dallas Imbimbo, right, and his former high school teammate Nick Kovacevich both ran successful businesses while still in college. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Dallas Imbimbo, top center, poses with members of the BigRentz.com staff at the company's headquarters in Santa Ana. The website helps customers shop for heavy equipment rentals much the way Travelocity helps people find deals on airfares and hotel rooms. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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One of Dallas Imbimbo's companies, Kush Bottles, sells colorful pop-top vials used primarily in the medical marijuana industry. Imbimbo says the Santa Ana-based firm, founded in 2010, has shipped 10 million of the small containers so far. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Dallas Imbimbo, left, and his former high school basketball teammate, Nick Kovacevich, run BigRentz.com out of a warehouse in Santa Ana. They also operate Kush Bottles, a company that sells plastic vials used mainly in the medical cannabis industry, and Three Kings, a partnership that buys and flips residential property out of state. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

THE TEAM AT A GLANCE

Companies

Launched by a group of basketball buddies, the ventures operate from a single warehouse in Santa Ana.

BigRentz.com: The primary enterprise, founded in 2012. Handles heavy-equipment rentals, enabling customers to shop many vendors at once. Website: BigRentz.com

Kush Bottles: Supplies pop-top vials for use mainly in the medical-marijuana industry. Has shipped 10 million bottles since its launch in 2010. KushBottles.com

Three Kings: A limited partnership to buy and flip distressed properties out of state, founded in 2011. The company concentrates on Chicago, where it has refurbished 15 homes so far. 3kingsventures.com

Key executives

Dallas Imbimbo, 28, president and CEO of BigRentz.com and Kush Bottles and a member of Three Kings partnership. Former basketball guard at UC Davis and competitor in TV’s “The Amazing Race” (2008).

Stephen Jesson, 46, executive vice-president of BigRentz.com but not involved in the other two companies. Former entrepreneur in the cell phone and pager industries.

Nick Kovacevich, 28, vice-president of BigRentz.com, chief operating officer of Kush Bottles and a member of Three Kings partnership. Former basketball guard/forward at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri.

John Kovacevich, 29, chief financial officer of Kush Bottles. Nick’s older brother and former basketball player at Santa Cruz High School.

Jeremy Logan, 27, vice-president of bookings for BigRentz.com and head of technology for all three companies. Former basketball guard at Southwest Baptist University.

Dallas Imbimbo is accustomed to moving fast. At 28, he is already a company president whose burgeoning empire includes three startups with 35 employees. He has the swagger of an ex-jock. In basketball, Imbimbo was a point guard who played briefly as a walk-on at UC Davis.

He gained greater renown on television's “The Amazing Race.” He and his mother, Toni, were in contention to win the global adventure show's top prize before misplacing a passport in Moscow.

“For Dallas, everything is about winning,” says Stephen Jesson, a business partner who met Imbimbo nearly two years ago. “And not only winning, Dallas wants to crush the competition.”

Nowadays, Imbimbo's team is a band of mostly young entrepreneurs hustling to grow their fledgling companies at a warehouse in Santa Ana. The group's main enterprise is BigRentz.com, a leading website for renting forklifts, backhoes and other heavy machinery. The group also operates Three Kings, which buys and refurbishes distressed residential properties out of state, and Kush Bottles, a distributor of plastic vials used in the medical marijuana industry.

Sports is a bond that helped to make everything possible. Two of Imbimbo's partners – Nick Kovacevich and Jeremy Logan, who are also in their late 20s – played basketball at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri. Jesson, who never played college ball but has backpacked through Europe, Thailand and Australia, is the old man of the group at 46. He says the gung-ho spirit his colleagues developed on the hardwood has powered the companies' rapid growth from just four employees a year ago.

“I hear them saying quotes that their coaches said in college,” Jesson says. “They refer back to what they learned in team sports a lot just in handling day-to-day situations.”

Imbimbo, Kovacevich and Logan still play hoops together in evening adult leagues. They also have taught themselves how to be effective teammates in the difficult arena of launching startups, a transition that involved melding strong personalities, says Kovacevich, who, at 6-foot-4, was the outstanding basketball player of the bunch – twice a team captain at Southwest Baptist.

“It wasn't all smooth sailing,” Kovacevich says. “Now everything is great because we're rolling. We kind of cleared the air and made an informal pact” that business issues were not going to affect friendships.

“We go out to dinner as friends. We have a few beers. We're talking about business, but it's not like a business meeting at all. It's something we want to do, but we're brainstorming.”

Imbimbo, who jokes he could be 6-foot-1 if he found the right pair of tennis shoes, says everyone has a role in the group, just as on a basketball team.

“You figure out how to build on people's strengths, and you don't worry about their weaknesses,” Imbimbo says. “You just build on what they're really good at and put all those pieces together. We've been fortunate enough that we've found all the different pieces we need at a young age.”

RENTING HEAVY EQUIPMENT

Imbimbo – “a natural born leader,” Kovacevich says – is the primary investor in the businesses and president and CEO of BigRentz, which facilitates heavy-equipment rentals in much the same way that Travelocity enables its customers to shop for airline flights and hotel rooms on a single website. BigRentz owns no heavy machinery but serves as a brokerage to hook up customers with deals at rental yards nationwide.

Jesson, who initially developed the concept of aggregating equipment-rental services, says at first he had difficulty finding investors. No one would ever rent scissor lifts by browsing the Internet, they thought.

“I knew the idea was great,” Jesson says. “I thought it could really explode if I got somebody behind it.” One of his friends happened to know Imbimbo and Kovacevich, and the two basketball players saw the potential. Jesson agreed to a partnership and now serves as executive vice president, sharing a spacious, second-floor office with Imbimbo.

Clients have included ESPN and Fox Sports, Imbimbo says. Color in Motion 5K, a company that stages fun runs in U.S. cities, uses BigRentz.com to line up scissor lifts, generators, backpack blowers and utility carts, says race director Adam Stark. The site has enabled him to find equipment for events in San Diego, Washington, D.C., Baton Rouge, La., and Colorado Springs, Colo., through a single source, Stark says.

“It just simplifies our lives,” he says. “We can focus on putting on our events without having to focus on logistics.”

Industry analysts say BigRentz may be well-positioned to take advantage of a sector – heavy-equipment-rental – that is expected to grow. Some segments of the construction industry have yet to rebound from the recession, but experts believe that recovery will occur, says analyst Scott Schneeberger of Oppenheimer & Co. in New York. In addition, those who use heavy equipment are becoming much more comfortable with renting machinery, Schneeberger adds.

The company has the advantage of being in a space where there's a need to organize customer options, says Karen Ubelhart, a senior industrial analyst for Bloomberg Industries. She says the sector is strewn with small independents. “What's unique to the rental industry is you've got an extremely fragmented, inefficient system.”

PRECOCIOUS ENTREPRENEUR

Imbimbo, who played alongside Kovacevich at Bellarmine College Preparatory, a private high school in San Jose, displayed his business instincts early. He recalls launching his first venture at age 11, burning CDs for his friends: 10 songs for $10.

In seventh grade, he and a friend began performing as DJs at school dances, forming a company called Kid DJ Mobile Entertainment. Imbimbo says they worked all through high school, appearing at dances, weddings and parties.

“Once they got that business going, they did all our school dances. Then they got to the point they were doing dances all around the area,” says Sharon Hobbs, then principal at Woodside Elementary School, where Imbimbo was a student. “He had the ‘smooths' and the ability to work a crowd. He was one of the kids who was never adult-shy.”

Hobbs chuckles remembering Imbimbo's 12th birthday, when he strode into her office, struck a pose to show off his biceps, and declared, “I'm 12!”

“He was that kind of kid,” she says. “He would put himself in your face, and do it in funny ways.”

Imbimbo's DJ partner, Peter Handy, eventually started BoxMyDorm.com, a company that helps college students store their belongings over the summer. Imbimbo launched a similar venture, Pack My Dorm, after enrolling at UC Davis. Imbimbo says he later served Stanford and UC Berkeley as well and sold the company in 2011 to a subsidiary of FlatRate Moving, giving him the capital to pursue other enterprises.

Logan and Kovacevich were at least in the same ballpark. Logan, raised in a Kansas farm town where 13 students made up his high school class, was a 5-foot-10 walk-on basketball player at Southwest Baptist, trying to pay his bills without a scholarship. He started dealing in textbooks, buying them used from other athletes and flipping them on the Internet. Before long, he says, he ran a full-page ad in the student newspaper, then secured a $20,000 bank loan and opened an off-campus bookstore.

By the time he finished school, Logan says, “I was able to write a check for all my student loans – $40,000. I only worked two months out of the year, so it was awesome.”

Kovacevich, who carried a 4.0 grade-point average while serving as Southwest Baptist's team captain, was on scholarship and did not have to scramble for income, but Logan inspired him. “It was amazing how his thing took off,” Kovacevich says of the book business. “I actually started working for him a little bit … and doing a side business selling stuff on eBay.” He'd go around to the dorms, collecting unwanted clothing, computers, cellphones and jewelry, Kovacevich says. “I was making a couple hundred bucks a month. The town we were in, you could rent a house for $400 a month.”

After college, the two former high school teammates, Imbimbo and Kovacevich, decided to team up again with Logan and Kovacevich's brother John by starting a company – and they agreed that Orange County was the place to do it. They moved in 2010, driving all night from Sacramento and settling into a two-bedroom apartment in Irvine where they slept for months on air mattresses. The partners seemingly worked nonstop, arriving home at 11 p.m. and grabbing dinners at a sushi joint that stayed open until midnight.

The team's success this year is requiring a move. On Jan. 1, the companies will relocate to a larger building where the BigRentz sign will be visible from the freeway, Imbimbo says.

One of the toughest jobs for Imbimbo's business partners is reining in his enormous ambition, Jesson says. “Every time I want to slow things down, he wants to speed things up,” he says. “Trust me, sometimes I feel like I'm playing one-on-three.”

Jesson projects at least 100 employees by the end of 2014, but to Imbimbo that's only a start. He plans to flex his muscles in the business world for a long time.

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